n553  0538  22 Dec 81
BC-TECH-2ndadd-12-22
    x x x ESTABLISHED IN 1976.
    Looking back today, a leader in the move toward Asilomar, Prof. Paul
Berg of Stanford, argues that the reason for the moratorium was
misunderstood. ''We were concerned about public health rather than
the moral and ethical consequences of what the research would lead
to. Most of us thought that was a separate issue, one for society to
decide.''
    Nevertheless, three years ago, in the wake of the Asilomar meeting,
Daedalus, the journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences,
published an entire issue on ''The Limits of Scientific Inquiry.''
Among the 15 essays, was one by Prof. Robert Sinsheimer, now the
chancellor of the University of California at Santa Cruz, then
chairman of the biology department at UCLA.
    Sinsheimer shocked his colleagues by arguing that the pursuit of
knowledge, inseparable from the application of that knowledge, should
be restrained. ''Is the accumulation of knowledge unique among human
activities - an unmitigated good that needs no counterweight? Perhaps
that was true when science was young and impotent, but hardly now,''
Sinsheimer wrote.
    Baltimore took an opposing view, arguing that restraints on basic
research will inevitably be subject to political and social ideology
and can not be applied without foreclosing unpredictable avenues of
discovery. ''Major breakthroughs cannot be programmed.''
    ''The biggest problem now is not the problem of safety, but the
problem of success,'' says Weiner, who has studied the development of
recombinant DNA since before Asilomar and believes the airing of the
controversy, the unprecedented exchange of scientific information and
the talk of risks and benefits spurred both research and industry.
    At hearings in Somerville, Mass., this year, citizens questioned the
credibility of scientists on safety issues. ''I believe the
scientists were right (on the absence of risk), but they were
challenged because of their business involvement,'' says Weiner.
Baltimore, who is a founder of Collaborative Research, Inc., and the
newly appointed director of the $110 million Whitehead Laboratory for
molecular embryology at MIT, is aware of the conflicts and
complexities posed.
    ''The problem of commercial involvement is a very hard thing to
answer,'' says Baltimore. ''I think everyone in the world has
multiple allegiances. As long as you're up front about your
involvements, so that others can make whatever judgments they need to
make, you can't do any more than that.'
    A similar problem occurs with computers. ''Machines aren't a threat
now,'' says Marvin Minsky. ''But when they're very smart, we have to
be careful about whether we want them to be so smart. That might be
very hard. The subject may be so fuzzy you'd say, 'We won't build any
very smart machines until we understand them.' But the world isn't
that way. If it looks profitable they'll build them.''
    Halting research on artificial intelligence ''would need something
like a nuclear arms treaty,'' Minsky believes.''I don't think you
could stop it at all. You could make it a crime to make certain kinds
of machines. No, you couldn't do that; you couldn't define them.''
    Is there any area in which basic research should be stopped
altogether? Berg answers with ''a flat no.'' Baltimore and others
hold for a distinction between science and technology. ''When it is
mice, it's research; when it's humans, it's technology,'' Baltimore
argues. ''The principle of separation is the only one that will allow
science to continue forward.''
    Sinsheimer remains concerned. ''To say do the research but not the
technology seems naive or simplistic. What's changed (since the 1978
Daedalus article) is the realization of how powerful our cultural
bias is toward the development of any new technology.'' The ability
to alter the human gene pool ''will be viewed as another branch of
medicine, to remove genetic defects. But what is a defect? And should
the work be limited to defects? Why not improvements? That gets into
the area of imposing characteristics on your descendants. Nobody is
thinking about that,'' Sinsheimer says.
    Sissela Bok, a lecturer in medical ethics at Harvard, has suggested
that the effort should be to ''press the limits of the clearly
intolerable and the clearly innocuous so as to make (the disputed)
middle-ground group as small as possible. ... The moratorium is only
appropriate as a last resort for the narrowed middle category. It
ought never to be used as a weapon against politically unpopular
research unless some demonstrable risk is at issue.''
    The very nature of pioneering research makes it hard for scientists
to explain what they are doing and impossible for them to predict
where they are going. But laymen should keep asking. ''That can be a
very effective thing,'' says Baltimore, ''if laymen ask questions
without prejudice. Ask scientists what they're really doing; draw out
their concerns; make them say where they're really going.''
    ''It is probably true,'' says Jerome Wiesner, ''that most scientific
discoveries have a potential for evil or destructive use. So there is
a dilemma. The answer is not halting research; it's managing the
consequences.''
    END
    
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